After the chicken pie on Tuesday last week, we had meat-free Wednesday - not as catchy as meat free Monday, granted, but I'm not going to be tied to the alliterative benefits of a particular day of the week (despite my penchant for linguistic trickery) for reducing the amount of meat in our diet. Twice baked potatoes it was - a brilliant addition to our regular meals thanks to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall (in Veg Everyday, I think). So easy it doesn't need a recipe - bake your tatties, scoop out the insides and mash them up with butter, or cream cheese (Philadelphia with garlic & herbs is good), plus extras - chopped up spring onions, tinned sweetcorn, that sort of thing. While you're doing this, pop the skins back in the oven to crisp up, then whip them out, pile the skins back up with the enriched potato and pop back in the oven for 10 mins. Easy peasy and very delicious.
Thursday, though, we were back with the chicken that I cooked for the pie on Tuesday, plus the joys of the veg box, which included 3 small green peppers and some small red onions. Paella - of sorts - beckoned. Plenty of smoked paprika and some chorizo to spice things up, and unfortunately no seafood - which probably means its not paella at all, but hey, I used paella rice, so I'm going to call it paella.
A couple of other notes - if I'd had a choice, I would probably have used red pepper rather than green, and I forgot to include any garlic. It's not fatal as the chorizo is quite garlicky, but it would have been nice. I think a bit of chilli would also have been good - we got some lovely looking ones in the veg box, but I suspect they are of the firey variety, and as I was feeding the kids, I had to make do with the tabasco bottle to spice up my portion.
Easy Paella - for 4
125g cooking chorizo, cut into bite size pieces
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
2 small red onions, or 1 large one, finely chopped
3 small green peppers - substitute for red if you have the choice, to be honest, but the veg box yielded small green ones...
300g paella rice
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1 litre of stock (if you poached a chicken to make the pie, you'll have some lovely stock to use for this)
170g cold cooked chicken cut into bite size pieces.
Heat your stock up in a pan (or, if you're me, defrost the stock over a gentle heat because you forgot to get it out of the freezer earlier...).
Heat a large frying pan and chuck in the chorizo. Cook gently til lthe oils start to run then add in the garlic, onion and pepper and cook till softening, then stir in the rice and the coriander and paprika.
Cook for a couple of minutes, then tip in the stock, bring to a simmer and leave to bubble away till the rice is cooked.
Stir in the chicken and garnish with chopped parsely if you have it to hand.
Serve with a bottle of tabasco on the side for those that need a little more heat.
The rest of the chicken meat went in sandwiches, and I still have 2 litres of stock left from poaching the original chicken too. So I reckon that's pretty good value. What do you think?
What tasty looking paella!
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